Friday, August 25, 2017

August 25th...This Day in History (Now with links to other events)

The Great Moon Hoax 1835

On this day in 1835, the first in a series of six articles announcing the supposed discovery of life on the moon appears in the New York Sun newspaper.

Known collectively as “The Great Moon Hoax,” the articles were
supposedly reprinted from the Edinburgh Journal of Science. The byline
was Dr. Andrew Grant, described as a colleague of Sir John Herschel, a
famous astronomer of the day. Herschel had in fact traveled to Capetown,
South Africa, in January 1834 to set up an observatory with a powerful
new telescope. As Grant described it, Herschel had found evidence of
life forms on the moon, including such fantastic animals as unicorns,
two-legged beavers and furry, winged humanoids resembling bats. The
articles also offered vivid description of the moon’s geography,
complete with massive craters, enormous amethyst crystals, rushing
rivers and lush vegetation.

The New York Sun, founded in 1833, was one of the new “penny
press” papers that appealed to a wider audience with a cheaper price and
a more narrative style of journalism. From the day the first moon hoax
article was released, sales of the paper shot up considerably. It was
exciting stuff, and readers lapped it up. The only problem was that none
of it was true. The Edinburgh Journal of Science had stopped
publication years earlier, and Grant was a fictional character. The
articles were most likely written by Richard Adams Locke, a Sun
reporter educated at Cambridge University. Intended as satire, they were
designed to poke fun at earlier, serious speculations about
extraterrestrial life, particularly those of Reverend Thomas Dick, a
popular science writer who claimed in his bestselling books that the
moon alone had 4.2 billion inhabitants.

Readers were completely taken in by the story, however, and failed to
recognize it as satire. The craze over Herschel’s supposed discoveries
even fooled a committee of Yale University scientists, who traveled to
New York in search of the Edinburgh Journal articles. After Sun
employees sent them back and forth between the printing and editorial
offices, hoping to discourage them, the scientists returned to New Haven
without realizing they had been tricked.

On September 16, 1835, the Sun admitted the articles had been a
hoax. People were generally amused by the whole thing, and sales of the
paper didn’t suffer. The Sun continued operation until 1950, when it merged with the New York World-Telegram. The merger folded in 1967. A new New York Sun newspaper was founded in 2002, but it has no relation to the original.

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